This one may be a little out of date, but the years of my PhD was the a real purple patch for anyone who could coax a computer into drawing a scale-free hairball of whatever “interactome” you could get your hands on.
You can get your own “Being a Scientist” template here and create your own, you crafty bastards you.
Science has a news piece asking Is Motherhood the Biggest Reason for Academia’s Gender Imbalance?.
Well, I don’t know if it’s the biggest reason, but this issue is certainly huge – it has been an issue in every lab in which I have worked, and in ~90% of the labs that I observe around me. Which is why I don’t understand the pushback from some researchers quoted in the article, such as this:
“I think [the issue] does have merit, for a subset of women, during one part of their lives,” Nelson says. “However, it has not uncovered a problem which, when solved, will create an equal environment for women.” Nelson says it would be unfortunate if departments “were to invest millions of dollars in things like in-house daycare centers” only to find that such investments improved conditions for “a relatively small number of women.”
Seriously??? In-house child-care and other investments to help mothers in academic science would benefit only a relatively small number of women? Walk into just about any science department at any research university in this country, and you will quickly be disabused of the notion that this is an issue for a relatively small number of women. Continue reading “Motherhood vs the Lab”
If you haven’t been following the dust-up over science publisher Springer’s announcement of a volume by creationists, you should head over to the Panda’s Thumb and follow the latest, if only for its entertainment value.
While you’re there, check out the slide from John Sandord, a creationist who claims that he’s a geneticist at Cornell*. He plots human lifespan as a function of centuries born after Noah, and gets an impressive R^2 of 0.90. I’m sure this is going to upend the field of lifespan genetics.
*As is usual, this is not quite what you think it is.
Springer’s editors in the field of engineering who aren’t familiar with the star figures of the intelligent design movement appeared ready to put the prestigious Springer stamp on a volume of pseudoscience:
The volume in question, entitled Biological Information: New Perspectives, edited by R. J. Marks II, M. J. Behe, W. A. Dembski, B. L. Gordon, and J. C. Sanford, and slated to appear in a series of engineering books dubbed the Intelligent Systems Reference Library, was advertised by Springer as presenting “new perspectives regarding the nature and origin of biological information,” demonstrating “how our traditional ideas about biological information are collapsing under the weight of new evidence,” and written “by leading experts in the field” who had “gathered at Cornell University to discuss their research into the nature and origin of biological information.”
Continue reading “Springer Press almost suckered by Intelligent Design”
I think this is the first spoof of the MythBusters “Being a Scientist” list, as you can see both Mike and my handwriting. My PhD is in Molecular Cell Biology. So, I am making fun of myself, a bit. Well, I’m mostly making fun of the rest of molecular cell biology, because none of these critiques apply to me.
You can get your own “Being a Scientist” template here and create you own, you crafty bastards you.
The Finch and Pea 